Pickles !!!

Thanks to my friend, Pat Borders, I have cucumbers and therefore I am making pickles. I made 8 pints of Bread and Butter Pickles over the weekend and 7 pints of dill pickles last night. 7 more pints are in the canner as I write this. These 7 will be mild since I ran out of dill seed and had to use dill weed instead. Actually, I'm not sure how they will turn out. I'm using a different recipe than the one I used before (though similar) and my pickle making skills aren't the best but hopefully they will at least be crisp.

I've started harvesting beans and the garlic is almost ready as are the onions. I also expect to start harvesting corn any day now. I'm going to try some tonight for supper. I've had a few red tomatoes but they were all damages but there are some pink ones out there now, so real soon now.

I've slowly been working on my quilt for the quilt along. I'm cutting the strips into smaller strips and am almost done. I expect to be sewing next week. More details on my Kudzu Kwilts blog along with my problems getting fabric for my GT quilt.

Summer is here ...

And baby is it hot outside.

I've been pretty busy these last few weeks, though I guess it has been months since I last posted.
Here's what I've been up to:

Finished the baby blanket I was crocheting. It look very similar to the one I made year before last for Hannah's baby. I think I did a better job this time as it is mostly square.

Started a quilt-a-long (and a new blog, Kudzu Kwilts). We are making a twin size bed quilt. It will go on the trundle bed in my office.

Harvesting the garden has begun. We got lots of lettuce this spring along with broccoli and cabbage. I have frozen most of the broccoli and the cabbage is in the fridge. Fortunately cabbage keeps a long time. Started with squash and zucchini in the last week or so. We're having better luck, so far, with the squash and zucchini. The vine borers haven't been as bad. I'm trying to be better about spraying and that seems to be helping. I have more than I can handle at the moment. I've put up 5 jars of squash and 5 jars of zucchini the last 2 days and I have more to do today. I've made lots of zucchini bread too. Enough to start giving away.

Lawrence is out of town until Thursday with his sister and BIL. They will be staying here Thursday night. I'm sure I can get them to take some squash and zucchini when they leave to go home Friday.

Placemats

I want to post the pictures of my second quilt project. I made four placemats from my own pattern. The fabric is some that my friend, Pat Borders, gave to me before Christmas. While it's not fabric I would have chosen it worked great for what I needed it for which was to practice making a quilt from start (coming up with a design) to finish (hand stitching the binding). I mis-calculated a few things and mis-cut a few things but I managed to get it done and it was great practice for my bed quilt. I hope to be posting pictures of that soon. I just have to finish hand stitching the binding and it is going faster than I expected. Yeah. I plan to start on another baby quilt today.

It has finally gotten hot. The garden has needed watering already. Hard to believe that 2 weeks ago we were still complaining about the cold and the rain.

Jolie is going great. With just a few weeks work, I feel that she is almost where we left off last fall.

It's been a long time.

Well, it looks like I'm terrible at blogging. But I'm going to give it another shot.

I have a new hobby, quilting. As if I didn't already have enough. I'm working on about 7 projects right now.

1. Cross stitch. I'm almost done with the last carousel horse for Ky. The 4th of 4 that I started when Ky was a baby. She is now 18 and in college. But I'm finishing up the backstitching now. Soon, real soon now.
2. I quilted a baby blanket for my niece who is having twins this summer. It was from a kit and I just need to sew up the seam. Should only take a few minutes, don't know why I'm delaying.
3. Quilted placemats. All I need to do with them is do the final sewing on the binding. I'm waiting until I finish the cross stitch so I can do it while watching TV.
4. Bed Quilt. I took a class at JoAnn's last October and I've been slowing working on finishing the quilt. I finally quilted the center parts yesterday. I'm not sure how I want to quilt the borders. I need to get an embroidery foot for my sewing machine so I can do a curvy quilt pattern. Then I need to practice on something else to see how it goes. If that doesn't go well then I'll just do some straight lines and a diamond pattern or something similar.
5. I'm braiding a new glasses holder thingy. I made a beaded one a couple of years ago but it keeps getting tangled up so I thought I would try a new way. It is taking longer than I thought.
6. Gardening. It's that time of year again.
7. Riding - I'm still working on the canter. I'm not sure we will ever have a good one.

I still need to make 1 more baby blanket for Sarah. She is having twins so one won't do. I will either crochet on or make another quilt. They will not be identical (neither the blankets or the twins). Hopefully Sarah is ok with that. I also have several crochet projects I want to do.

And I'm back on the diet. I gained about 5+ pounds last year so I've been working to take them off since the first of the year. So far so good, I'm down to 130 (on my scale which weights you in about 10lbs light, so I really weight more like 140).

I guess that's about all for today.

February recap

Well it has been a while since I posted last. Not much has been going on. I've thought about posting though.

It is the last day of the month and my weight is 129. So I guess I've lost about 5 pounds since Jan 1. I've had to really up the exercise though. I'm using www.sparkpeople.com to keep track of calories burned and www.nutritiondata.com to keep track of calories eaten. I could use sparkpeople to do both but I like nutritiondata's pantry better than sparkpeople's. It is a little easier to use. So this week I've managed to keep my calories eaten under 1500 each day and with riding, walking and dancing I'm burning an extra 600 calories or so. That should leave me with a calorie deficit of around 1000. There are 3500 calories in a pound of fat so I should be losing about 2 pounds a week. So far I haven't been losing at that rate but I've only been tracking calories for about a week now and I think that sparkpeople may be over estimating how many calories I burn riding. I'll probably blow the diet today though as I am eating out for lunch and dinner.

As for walking, I've started walking outside when the weather had cooperated. This has made it easier to walk for an hour. If I do it on the treadmill I get bored and tired and quit. I walked 65 minutes yesterday. Today I've too much to do so I won't get to walk but we are going dancing tonight so that will burn some calories.

I'm still working on an afghan in HPL. It is going slow. It takes a lot of strips to make an afghan. I made some grocery bags from t-shirts the other day. I need to find some more t-shirts (mostly I need to acknowledge that I probably won't wear a lot of the t-shirts I currently have in my closet, and I have a lot) so that I can make enough bags to make it worthwhile to take them to the store with me.

Most of my seeds didn't sprout. I need to replant some. If I wait too much longer, they won't be ready to plant when it is time.

Our anniversary was Wednesday. That is why we are going dancing tonight. 21 years.

Gardening

Not much has been going on around here lately. I've misplaced my cell phone which is very annoying. The battery is dead so calling it doesn't help. I'm sure it must be around the house somewhere but who knows where.

Of the seeds I planted last weekend, 5 broccoli have come up.

I went to the dentist yesterday. Everything looked good. I have some periodontal disease and have to go get my teeth cleaned every 3 months. I've gotten where I sort of enjoy it now. I had to have a tooth pulled last spring and the tooth next to it is healing up which is the idea.

I'm pretty much done with federal taxes. I won't mail off ours until April since we owe. I mailed Larry's last week and I need to mail Kys though there isn't much point since she doesn't get anything back (nor did she have to pay anything). I still have to go to the library to get the state tax forms.

I finally installed Family Tree Maker last night and transfered all my genealogy stuff from Legacy. Unfortunately it seems to have lost all the pictures. It has some pretty neat features which will make updating things pretty easy, though. You can press a button and it will search ancestry.com for you and give a list of likely matches which are easy to merge into existing records. I've already found the ship immigration list for when Lawrence's grandmother came from Panama in 1927. Way cool. So I guess my next big project is to start working on genealogy stuff again. I have a lot of information from Lawrence's family that needs to be entered.

HPL Bookmark

Here is a picture of the HPL bookmark made from this pattern:




Instead of using a sport weight yarn I used size 10 cotton thread. It is kind of limp and wants to twist so I've put some stiffener on it to see if that will help. I'll report back here if it works.

Nothing much else is going on here. We've had a lot of rain lately so I haven't been able to ride but today was nice and warm and the ring is in pretty good shape so I was able to ride today. It is supposed to rain again tomorrow but then be warm and clear for a while. I also walked outside today instead of on the treadmill.

I started some seeds yesterday. I don't have a green thumb, but we do manage to get some vegies to grow in our garden every year. I planted 18 broccoli, 36 spinach, 9 lettuce and 9 cilantro seeds in a seed starter in the basement. I don't usually have good luck starting my own vegies from seed but Lawrence did really well with tomatoes last year so I thought I would try again.

Current weight was 130 this morning.